While walking to the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice this summer, PJ and I were window shopping as we passed various art galleries. One in particular caught our eyes, the Galleria d’Arte Bac Art Studio.

This studio stood out to us for two reasons. First, most of the paintings in the window were etchings and watercolors, a medium that we both really like. And second, many of the works seemed to exemplify a queer aesthetic, also something we both really like.

After we visited the Guggenheim, we went back to the Bac Art Studio. This time we went inside and had a good look around. The work that PJ instantly expressed a fondness for depicts two men shaving. It’s called “The Razor”:

This painting is by Paolo Baruffaldi, a Venetian artist who has a few series of paintings displayed in the gallery. Even though “The Razor” was our favorite, we liked how a lot of his work seems to depict Venice as a homoerotic locale, something that we definitely did not pick up on while we were there. In fact, we felt that Italy as a whole was severely lacking in visible gay people, though we just might not have been looking in the right places.

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